How to get attention through Facebook’s mobile ads — blue hair?

As more Facebook users check their News Feed from their phone, the mobile app install advertisement is becoming the hottest trend for developers. But it takes more than just a screenshot of the app to get a user to download it.

Leah Na’aman, the marketing manager for SocialClicks, talked at the Inside Social Apps conference recently in San Francisco to share some best practices for really reaching customers and potential app users through the News Feed.

The one fail-proof tip? Blue hair.

Well, the blue hair won’t work for everyone, but Na’aman said that game developers can tint their main characters’ hair in the mobile app install ad as a fallback when everything else fails.

Na’aman pointed out that there are plenty of opportunities on Facebook for game and non-game app developers. 20 percent of Facebook users play games every day, and the company is experiencing a 25 percent increase in monthly paying users. More than half of Facebook users are on mobile now, and 3,800 developers used mobile app install ads in the first quarter of the year to drive 25 million downloads. She noted that 25 percent of mobile display ads are on Facebook, and that mobile app install ads yield click-through rates around 2 to 3 percent.

Na’aman encouraged attendees at the Inside Social Apps conference to utilize mobile targeting to make sure they’re getting the most bang for their buck, ensuring that the ads are being served to the users who would care about them. Additionally, she recommended that developers look into utilizing custom audiences so companies can target and retarget their Facebook ads.

She then described what makes for a winning ad in the mobile Facebook News Feed:

The ideal ad is a combination of the right targeting, the right image, the right text, and then A/B testing all of these different variables until you get the perfect combination of them all. This ideal ad is going to talk to the right people, in the right place, and in the right way, and in the right time.

One of Na’aman’s biggest recommendations from her speech was to stop making statements in Facebook ads. It’s not really exciting to just tell a user about a product — questions usually perform much better than statements. Developers can either command users to do something through a call to action or ask for input. But just having a statement about how awesome the app is will usually fail to excite the users enough to click on the ad and install the app.

She also suggested that advertisers play with colors and shapes. Depending on the type of game (or other app) you have, bright, vibrant colors tend to catch the eye more than dull ones. This is where the blue hair on the character image for the ad creative comes in. For gaming apps, the image that accompanies the mobile app install ad should really pop and show various characters, letting gamers know that they have options.

Additionally, once a user purchases the app or makes some kind of transaction — don’t let the engagement end there, Na’aman said:

Utilize your advertising for the whole lifecycle. Customers can come back, re-engage, and keep using your applications, and keep playing your game, and keep monetizing for you in the future.

Readers: What best practices have you found with regard to mobile ads?